Anonymous commenter fired from his job after newspaper hunts him down

Every once and a while, old analogue media gets an opportunity to prove exactly how out of touch with the Internet and social media it actually is. No case better exemplifies that than the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s recent move to get an anonymous commenter fired from his job for leaving an objectionable comment on their website.

The comment was made by a reader on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website on Friday. The article was called, “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten and did you like it?” An article like that, as anyone on the Internet knows, just begs for a lewd response, but when a reader responded with an obvious, four letter answer, the St. Louis Post-Dispactch’s director of social medias Kurt Greenbaum, tracked the comment’s IP down to a local school and narced, getting a school employee fired in the process.

Greenbaum is unrepentant. When a commenter accused him of hating his job of comment moderation so much he had to get someone fired, he responded: “Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com’s Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the ‘submit’ key.”

It’s really hard to think of a response that could make Greenbaum seem like more of a turd, or for that matter, more out of touch with his job. The issue isn’t whether he “made” someone make a vulgar comment, because that takes it as read that an anonymous comment that a moderator disagrees with should cost a man his career. A director of social media should know that the way to improve commentary on a site is to engage with the readership in the comments, not hunt “bad” commenters down in real life. There’s one person in this story who should have been fired, and it’s not the one who was.

Speak Your Mind

Noobs

Let me guess, something starts with ‘S’ and end with a ‘T’ uh?
and its only four (4) letters… hmmmmmm… *!*

imposter

SHIT

NOW TRACK ME DOWN AND GET ME FIRED!

Esoom Yale

I would have thought that a more balanced response would have been to moderate all comments, and remove those that are inappropriate or offensive. Just delete these comments, not hunt people down and get them fired. Well, not unless they do something really extreme.